Tag: Corruption

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher argued that in order to think things in America are going well, “you have to not care about democracy, Russia, corruption, the environment.” Maher said, “[A]lmost 60 percent of the

Up to half of the estimated $126 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds devoted to nation-building efforts in Afghanistan are “misspent, mismanaged, or disappears entirely,” a top staffer from Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) office testified this week.

A year and seven months after being filmed allegedly buying Class A illegal drugs for male prostitutes, Labour MP and former Minister Keith Vaz has been referred to the police by the Commons ethics watchdog.

Blogger Kim Dong-won, who writes under the alias “Druking,” is on trial in South Korea for the offense of “manipulating online opinion” against President Moon Jae-in and “obstructing business” by tinkering with a commercial website. The charges against Kim involve manufacturing a few hundred phony “likes” for comments on a news site called Naver, which might seem like a trivial offense, but the case has blossomed into a scandal that might even involve the South Korean presidency.

Chinese police held a press conference on Monday in which they claimed twin brothers Chen Zhiyu and Chen Zhiheng forged documents at the behest of dissident billionaire Guo Wengui and leaked them to the Washington Free Beacon, leading to the publication of two stories embarrassing to the Chinese government. Chinese authorities admitted to using “coercive measures against the Chen brothers,” as the state-run Xinhua news service puts it, to obtain elaborate forced confessions.

Sun Zhengcai, formerly one of China’s rising political stars and a possible successor to President Xi Jinping, completed his fall from grace on Thursday by pleading guilty to taking $27 million in bribes between 2002 and 2017.

Park Geun-hye, the former president of South Korea and its first female chief executive, was sentenced to 24 years in prison on Friday for corruption and abuse of power charges, effectively a life sentence for the 66-year-old defendant. She was also ordered to pay $17 million in fines.

Detectives drafted into a diverse London borough at the centre of a number of serious corruption scandals are reportedly looking into 39 new claims of electoral fraud ahead of local elections next month.

Protesters in Brazil have organized street manifestations on Tuesday in anticipation of a final appellate decision on whether former president – and current presidential frontrunner – Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will have to begin to serve his 12-year prison sentence immediately, effectively cutting off his presidential campaign.

PARIS (AP) — Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is being ordered to stand trial on charges of corruption and influence peddling, in yet another humbling knockdown to the hard-charging conservative leader.

A Chinese court handed down a death sentence on Wednesday for Zhang Zhongsheng, former vice-mayor of the city of Luliang, who has been convicted on corruption charges. The court cited Zhang’s “extreme greed” to explain the harsh sentence, which China’s state-run Global Times hailed as the “ultimate deterrent” and a powerful signal to other corrupt officials.

Former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, who held office from 2008 to 2013 and is now 77 years old, was arrested late Thursday night on corruption charges. The allegations include bribery, embezzlement, abuse of power, breach of the public trust, illegally withholding presidential documents, tax evasion, and election law violations. The charges carry a combined sentence of up to 45 years in prison.

Peruvian courts are weighing whether to prevent Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who resigned as president on Wednesday, from leaving the country following multiple allegations of corruption, including one linking him to the disgraced Brazilian firm Odebrecht.

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accused Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of stealing the people’s money to amass his fortune of approximately $800 billion toman, or $190 billion dollars.

Peter Schweizer joined Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow on Wednesday to discuss the corruption rampant among America’s imperial political families, especially those bought off by an increasingly brazen and aggressive China.

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, joined SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight co-hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Monday to explain how politicians corruptly monetize political power as detailed in his latest book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and author of the new book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, joined SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight on Monday to detail the involvement of Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden’s second son, in a China-backed private equity firm’s investment in a Chinese atomic energy company indicted for “nuclear power conspiracy against the United States.”

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, highlighted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) financial ties to the Chinese government as an example of how politicians monetize political influence while evading financial disclosure regulations.

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, joined Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight to discuss revelations in his latest book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, including how former President Barack Obama’s “smash and grab” strategy allowed friends to buy up various companies for “pennies on the dollar” following market devaluations resulting from the Obama administration’s regulatory policies. Some of the ill-gotten funds later found their way into the Obama Foundation.

House and Senate Republicans developed a consensus reform of the EB-5 visa-buying program — but two New York lobbying groups are using Democratic allies to block the reform, says Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Israel Police have asked the attorney general for permission to question Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara, and possibly also their son Yair before the Passover holiday, which begins on March 30, in connection with the Bezeq corruption probe.

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz announced on Sunday that special units of anti-corruption prosecutors have been established to “protect the homeland and its resources, maintain public money and protect the integrity of the public employment.”

China’s National People’s Congress approved the creation of the “National Supervisory Commission” on Sunday, an agency that allows Communist Party leader Xi Jinping unfettered power to inspect potentially “corrupt” members of the Communist Party.

A woman arrested in December for removing her hijab in public and waving it to protest the compulsory law on wearing it since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was sentenced on Thursday to up to two years in prison for “encouraging corruption.”

Brazil’s appellate court rejected leftist Brazilian president and current presidential frontrunner Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s habeas corpus request on Tuesday that would have kept him from prison until he exhausted his final appeal on a 12-year corruption sentenced handed down last year.

After completing a five-hour questioning session by police Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he felt “more sure than ever before” that “nothing” will come of the latest corruption investigation.

Police are reportedly making efforts to again interrogate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Bezeq corruption probe, known as Case 4000, and to take his testimony in another case involving alleged graft in multi-billion-shekel naval deals.

A Nigerian government panel repudiated media claims that it held an “unidentified spiritual snake” responsible for eating $100,000 in public funds, reportedly conceding that “criminality and fraud” at the hands of one its staff members are to blame for the missing money.